Laser marking machines known in the prior art allow printing patterns on the support of plastic cards. These machines generally comprise a marking element which can be a laser transmitter, a marking location for lodging a card to be marked opposite the marking element, and a transfer path to supply the card to be marked to the marking location or remove cards already marked from the marking location. A marking machine of this type thus needs to stop the laser beam after marking a first card and to await the arrival of a second card to be marked to activate the laser beam. The machine, such as illustrated here, thus needs several sequences of steps to complete marking of a single smart card. The inertia of the transfer device and the temporisations to be applied for each sequence are penalising, since they generate time losses.